How To Develop The Best Back Attacks In Your Gym│Part 2
Take the back, retain the back and finish on the back.
In the first part of this series I broke down how to expose the back and how to ride the turtle position to take the back. This part will focus on retention.
Taking the back and attacking the back are exciting skills to learn. Unfortunately, holding the back can't have the same effect on our psyche. But maybe thinking about it in a different way can get you more excited and help you understand how important this skill really is.
Imagine working so hard to expose the back against someone good in a competition. You do it, you take the back, and now you are ready to go. You start hand fighting aggressively to get the RNC, but your retention skills aren't good enough, so your opponent gets out, takes top position, and you lose the match. You could have avoided this by focusing more on your back retention skills beforehand.
If you can't hold the back, you can't finish on the back. This also means that the more time you can hold the back, the more opportunities you have to submit your partner.
As Greg Souders says, "We play the game of immobilization as it leads to strangulation and breaking". So let's be clear, retention is the prerequisite for submission.
With that said, we can finally move on to developing the skills necessary to hold the back.
Back Retention Concepts
First, a little theory: When we pin someone chest to chest or chest to back, we are trying to immobilize the hips and shoulders at the same time. In the back, our arms do the job of immobilizing the shoulders while our legs control the hips. We also want to stay chest to back at all times. The moment the chest to back alignment is broken, the back position is in danger of being lost.
This means that the defender will try to break this alignment in any way he can. All back escapes do this by breaking into a chest to inside shoulder or chest to outside shoulder aligment. After getting one of these two aligments, the defensive player can continue to turn until he is facing his opponent chest to chest.
The back to the mat is one way to achieve a chest to outside shoulder alignment, while the turning escapes are ways to achieve a chest to inside shoulder alignment.
To achieve either of these aligments, the defensive player must rotate, and that rotation comes from the hips and shoulders that you are immobilizing. So the defender's first task is to free up some control in order to rotate. More specifically, he needs to release some control over both sides of his body. This can be done by freeing his two shoulders, his two hips, or most commonly, one hip on one side and one shoulder on the other side.
Diagonal Control
If you have studied the New Wave guys, you probably already know this. But a little review can't hurt.
When controlling the back position, we first want to get diagonal control. This means that we want to lock one hip in one side and one shoulder in the other. This will stop your opponent's rotation to either side and allow you to then establish full control over your opponent's hips and shoulders.
This concept applies to any chest-to-back behind the elbows alignment, but I thought this was the best time to introduce it. If you worked on the skills in the first article, you may already be doing this without knowing it.
If you can't completely immobilize the hips and shoulders, you need to prioritize diagonal control to keep the back. The most effective back escapes are designed to disrupt diagonal control.
Hooks & Body Triangle
Before going into the strengths and weaknesses of each possible side of the back, I wanted to talk about the leg configurations.
There are basically these possible configurations:
Two standard hooks: great job of immobilizing both hips, but are fairly easy to remove.
Top lock body triangle: greater immobilization on the top hip, but weaker on the bottom hip. Hard to get out of.
Bottom lock body triangle: greater immobilization on the bottom hip, but weaker on the top hip. Hard to get out of.
Long hook covering the full hip line, foot to foot: Same effect as the top lock body triangle. The only difference is that there's no lock. Good if you can't lock the triangle.
Long hook inside the hips & high ball ride (only change is the top hook): More control over the lower hip and helps with strangulation on the overhook side (more on this in part 3). In the case of a high ball ride, the top leg can help extend the opponent in different ways as needed.
Underhook Side vs Overhook Side
We'll talk more about this in the submission part of this series, but for now, let's just look at how these two sides differ in terms of retention.
Underhook Side
In the underhook side, our head is closer to the mat than our opponent's head. This has made people think that it's easier to get your back to the mat from there and escape as a defensive player, but in reality, against a good opponent, it's quite the opposite. The underhook and good head positioning stops the rotation to get the outside shoulder in.
As an attacker, if you have a top lock body triangle on the underhook side of your back, you have strong diagonal control over your opponent. Other leg configurations don't provide this. For example, a high ball ride from the underhook side doesn't give you diagonal control and allows your partner to get his inside shoulder into your chest to disrupt the initial alignment. A bottom body triangle has a similar effect. Standard hooks don't have this problem, but the defender can remove the top hook and get into the high ball ride to escape.
This is not to say that you can't get your outside shoulder in to escape the underhook side, it's just that it's less likely, but still a good way to escape.
Overhook Side
Now the dynamics change completely from the overhook side. In this scenario, our opponent's head is closer to the mat and it's wedged by our choke arm. We have an underhook on the top side that prevents his body from rotating in the direction necessary to slip his inside shoulder.
If we have good control of his top shoulder, it means we should prioritize control of his bottom hip. I'm not saying that a top lock body triangle doesn't work, it does and everyone uses it, but it's easier to escape from there compared to other leg configurations that emphasize the bottom hip more.
A bottom lock body triangle or a deep hook inside the hips does a great job from this position. This way a high ball ride isn't as bad as in the underhook side, and it's actually a good position depending on what you're looking for. Again, standard hooks work just fine, but your opponent can remove the underhook and try to get the outside shoulder in to get his back to the mat and face you chest to chest.
It's possible to slide your inside shoulder into the overhook side as a defender, but it's more difficult compared to sliding your outside shoulder and getting your back to the mat.
Okay, too much theory. Don't try to get it all at once. The goal of this section was to give you this conceptual understanding that you can go back to and review whenever you need to. Now let's do some practice.
Back Retention Against Live Resistance
When you are in your opponent's back, the defender will try to face you chest to chest in any way he can (if he knows the stuff I explained before, even better). Your job is to maintain chest to back contact for as long as possible with your arms connected to the shoulders.
Play with your leg configurations to keep him where you want him. Try to maintain diagonal control for as long as possible. If you lose it, try to regain it.
If you completely lose your lower body connections, you need to focus on keeping your upper body connections and go back to the ideas from the first part of this series on taking the back. This will allow you to regain the back and hold it longer. Retaining the back also means retaking the back because you will lose your hooks in several places and you will need to develop the ability to put them back in.
You can start with standard hooks and work from there to improve your lower body connections. After a while you will see where you need to improve. For example, it could be from the underhook side with only one top hook or only one bottom hook. It might be from the overhook side with only a top hook or only a bottom hook. This is how you improve your retention over time and then you'll be ready to go into submissions.
That's it for today. The next and final part will finally be about submitting from the back. I'm going to focus on the highest percentage submission in the sport: the rear-naked choke. We will also look at some auxiliar submissions like the rear triangle or armbars.